


in sickness and in health

by theantepenultimateriddle



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: F/F, Sickness, Surgery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-26
Updated: 2017-07-26
Packaged: 2018-12-07 11:02:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11622210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theantepenultimateriddle/pseuds/theantepenultimateriddle
Summary: “Minkowski?”The only answer you get is a soft groan, almost a sob, coming from a space between one of the control columns and a corner, and you start to get alarmed because she would never sound like that. Not unless something was very, very wrong.





	in sickness and in health

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Sasston for the idea! I kinda ran with it.

“Gee, Lieutenant, you don’t look so good.”

He’s right, you think to yourself- Minkowski has been looking pale and sweaty since yesterday, but now her hair is sticking to her face and her eyes are squinched up like she’s hiding something painful. She glares daggers at Eiffel nonetheless for even daring to mention it. “I’m fine, Eiffel. Get back to work.” He looks at her for another long moment before shrugging and turning back to the panel he’s working on, tugging on the wires. Minkowski watches him for a second, and then looks up at you. “Was there something you wanted to say, Captain?”

You open your mouth, then sigh. “Minkowski, can you at least try to take it easy today? We’re- _I’m_ worried about you.”

Minkowski flattens her mouth into a thin line, but when she speaks it’s with a grudging acknowledgement. “Fine.” She slumps her shoulders and then turns towards the door, grimacing as she glances back at you. “I’m going to go work on the compressors. If you need me, check the engine room. Is that taking it easy enough for you?”

You know that this is the best you’re going to get out of her, so you nod. “That works,” you say, and Minkowski propels herself out the door and into the corridor without another word.

\---

When you check the engine room, Minkowski is not fine. When you check the engine room, Minkowski isn’t even _visible_. You can’t see her anywhere, can’t find her at all. You finally decided to call her name, see if she answers or if she’s just not there, if she maybe left to go to the bathroom or get some water. “Minkowski?”

The only answer you get is a soft groan, almost a sob, coming from a space between one of the control columns and a corner, and you start to get alarmed because she would _never_ sound like that. Not unless something was very, very wrong. You slowly shove yourself towards the source of the noise, and when you get there you inhale sharply, your eyes widening in surprise. “Oh, my god.”

Minkowski’s there, all right, tucked away into the space between the columns and the wall, curled up tight in a ball with her arms clutching her abdomen. The contents of her stomach are all down the front of her uniform, staining it, and she looks so small and so fragile and like she’s in so much pain.

You’re afraid for her.

“Minkowski,” you say, speaking briskly now, trying to hide the fear in your voice. “What’s wrong? You need to tell me, now. As much as you possibly can.” _Because otherwise I’m clueless_ remains unsaid. _Because otherwise I don’t know how to help._

She looks up, and there are tears clinging to her bloodshot eyes. “Lovelace,” she says, more a gasp than a word. “My stomach…” Minkowski trails off, her gaze going unfocused as she makes a pained whine in her throat. “Hurts,” she whispers. “It hurts.”

“I know it hurts, but I need more information. Where does it hurt?” You’re speaking in a voice far calmer than you feel, because you can’t lose her, because you can’t panic or she will too. You look at Minkowski, at her body drawn into the fetal position, shoved into a tiny space, and wait for an answer.

Minkowski’s breath is coming faster now, almost in pants, and she speaks like her tongue is swollen in her mouth. “Lower… right… side,” she says, and ice water floods your veins, freezing your heart in place.

“Hera,” you say, urgent now. “I need all the information you have on appendicitis, now.”

Hera answers almost immediately- she must sense the urgency in your request, realize that this is worth her attention. Her voice is confused, and you can almost hear her virtual eyebrows draw together. “I can get you a lot of information, but why do you need it?”

You grab Minkowski’s upper arm and start carrying her, as gently as you can, towards the med bay. She’s feverish, and even in the microgravity she’s heavy. You speak through gritted teeth as you move, pushing yourself with only your legs. “Because,” you say, “Minkowski is sick.”

“Oh. _Oh_.” The penny drops, and Hera starts talking faster. “I’m getting everything I can about appendicitis now, Captain. I’ll have it by the time you get there.”

“Good,” you say, and then you push off just a little bit too hard and jar Minkowski and she lets out a choked whimper and oh god, Minkowski, please just hold on for a little bit longer. “Not far now,” you say, going as fast as you can while trying not to hurt her. And then the door to the med bay is in front of you and you kick it open, floating inside to drop Minkowski as carefully as you possibly can on the operating table. “Hera, information. _Now_.”

There’s a long pause, and then Hera speaks, sounding apprehensive. “You’re not going to like it.”

“Oh, for god’s-” you scrub your hand across your face and look at Hera’s nearest camera, staring directly into it. “I don’t need to like it, Hera, what I need is anything that will help Minkowski. Understand?” Minkowski punctuates your statement with another noise, and you just barely resist the urge to reach down and brush her hair away from her face.

Another pause, and Hera sighs. “We don’t have the medicine for any sort of treatment. So, you’re going to have to operate on her.”

You go through several stages in the span of a second, flipping from “But I’m not a medical officer” to “What if something goes wrong” to a little guilty voice that whispers “I don’t want to hurt her,” but you don’t say any of this out loud. Instead, you tell Hera, “You’ll have to guide me.”

“I will.”

“Good. So, step one. The anesthetic?” You look around and spot some hand sanitizer and rubber gloves, and something inside you pings. Clean hands. You need clean hands. So you pump on the hand sanitizer and snap on the gloves and await Hera’s instructions.

“Yes,” she says, quietly. “There should be an intravenous bag in the fridge, labeled. Hook it up to the machine, then drive the needle into the crook of her arm.”

You move over to the fridge, looking inside, but it’s a quick and disappointing search. “Hera,” you say, keep your voice steady because you can’t afford to explode right now, “there’s a bag, but there’s not nearly enough anesthetic inside of it to put Minkowski to sleep and keep her there for long.”

“I-” Hera falters, then recovers. “Okay. Okay. You’re right. You’re- You’re going to have to do the surgery with what you have.”

You freeze, the door to the fridge still open. “What?” You can feel your hand clenched on the handle shaking in fear, your whole body trembling. Behind you, Minkowski coughs convulsively, and the guilty voice in your mind forces its way out of your mouth. “I can’t risk hurting her, Hera, I can’t-”

Hera cuts you off, suddenly crisp, sharp-edged like glass. “Appendicitis can lead to a ruptured appendix, which comes with such lovely complications as, oh, widespread and extraordinarily painful inflammation of the abdomen’s inner lining, sepsis, and death. At this point, Captain, you can do one of two things. You can cut open Minkowski’s stomach with my guidance, remove the organ, and stitch her up again good as new, or you can do nothing and watch as her appendix ruptures and sends bacteria flooding through her abdominal cavity, eventually causing blood poisoning and killing her slowly and painfully. It’s your choice, of course. But I’m pretty sure one of these things is going to hurt Minkowski a lot worse than the other.”

She’s right. You know she’s right. Slowly, ever so slowly, you shut the fridge and turn back around to face Minkowski on the operating table, looking at her pained grimace, her cramped form. “Alrighty then.” You move over to her and, god help you, you start strapping her down.

Minkowski fights at first, but it seems to exhaust her to keep trying, just hurting her more. When you’ve bound her limbs to the table she looks up at you, her dark eyes confused. “Lovelace, why…”

You touch her shoulder, briefly, and you can feel the tears springing to your eyes. “I am so sorry about this,” you say. And then you start connecting the IV bag to the monitors as Hera shows you, hooking up the bag to a tube with a sharp needle at the end, and finally you drive it under Minkowski's skin on the inside of her elbow, right into the big vein. You watch her eyelids flutter and fall as she loses consciousness, and you try not to consider what will happen if you fuck up.

When she’s out, Hera starts guiding you, telling you what to do. “Pick up the scalpel,” she says, and you do, palming the instrument and gripping it tight. You can feel the cold of the metal even through your gloves. You have to fight to keep your hands from wavering. “Now, you need to expose the area on the lower right side of Minkowski’s torso, near her hip. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” you say, then take a deep breath and lift up Minkowski’s shirt, exposing her bare skin. You have to pull the hem of her pants down slightly for better access to the area, and you cringe as you do. Some absurd part of your brain thinks that this is not how you wanted to get into Minkowski’s pants, but you shove it away. Now is so very not the time. When there’s nothing blocking your access to the area Hera indicated, you pick up the scalpel again. “Tell me where to cut.”

“Move your hand just slightly down, and- there,” says Hera, and you stop moving, scalpel poised just above Minkowski’s skin. “You need to make an incision approximately 3 inches long.” You swallow, then lower the blade to Minkowski’s skin, pressing down on it. A small cut appears, and you can see her blood welling up, a wet and glistening red. Hera, from overheard, gives the best version of an electronic sigh that she can possibly muster. “Captain, you need to press harder,” she says, and even though you don’t think you can do it you do, trying to ignore the rise and fall of Minkowski’s breathing. Her skin splits open, and you hands are covered in blood, blue gloves smeared with them. You have to fight the urge to panic. Hera continues. “Now makes the incision.” You draw the blade across her, cutting through skin and muscle to the wetness of the organs below, up until Hera speaks. “Stop.” And you do, freezing in place, looking at what you’ve done.

The cut is small for what it is.

“Now what?” you ask, pausing to wait for further instructions. You can’t keep going without Hera dictating your every move. You can’t risk it.

A moment passes, and then Hera speaks. “Okay. The mass on the left is her large intestine. Don’t touch that. Her appendix is slightly further down.”

You move your hand with the scalpel to another place that looks almost identical. “Here?”

“Exactly. Now, Captain, you need to reach in and-”

Before Hera can complete her sentence, the med bay door opens again, and you hear Eiffel’s voice. “Captain, are you- Jesus Christ on a velociraptor, what are you _doing_?!”

“Eiffel, shut up,” you say. “Minkowski is sick. Minkowski is in danger of _dying_ , I am removing her appendix, and doing impromptu surgery with no medical training is hard enough without you yelling at me. Do you understand?”

“Captain-”

That’s the last straw, and you slam the scalpel down on the side of the operating table and whirl around to face him. “Eiffel, I love this woman,” you say, and you know it’s true. “If you think I want to hurt her, if you think this is something I’m enjoying, then you need to fucking re-evaluate.” He gapes at you, his mouth opening and closing like a fish, and you jerk your head at the door. “If you’re not going to be helpful, get out.” Slowly, he backs out of the room and shuts the door behind him, and you turn back to Minkowski. “Hera, what were you saying?”

Her voice is hushed now. “You need to reach in and pull it up into the wound.”

You swallow, then obey, reaching down and grasping the slippery, yielding wetness of the organ and pulling it up further. You can see it clearly now- it glistens in the fluorescent med bay lights, and your vision swims for a second, because this is so fundamentally wrong that it makes your brain scream. Her organs shouldn’t be visible. She shouldn’t be this _vulnerable_. When you speak, it’s a whisper. “Like this?”

“Yes. And now you need to cut it off.”

You inhale deeply, put the scalpel to her organ, and make the first slice. And then Minkowski twitches, and you freeze, feeling like the air has been sucked out of your lungs. “She’s waking up,” you say, and you can hear yourself about to panic. “We need to finish this.”

“Then cut faster,” says Hera, and you obey. It’s terrifying how easy it is, how simply and quickly you can cut through her. Under Hera’s guidance, you pull out her removed appendix, trying to ignore how Minkowski is getting more restless, waking up more and more. Hera tells you what to do, and finally, finally, you sew her up, stitching the muscle and skin closed. Then you strip off the gloves, clean away the blood, and wait.

Minkowski wakes up five minutes after you finish, and the first word out of her mouth when she opens her bloodshot eyes is “Isabel.”

You have to blink back tears, but manage to give her a weak smile. “Hey, Minkowski,” you say. “How are you feeling?”

She doesn’t say anything, just exhales, long and slow. “Tired,” she says, her voice dreamy, and she lays her head back and looks up at the ceiling as you unstrap her from the table.

\---

When she’s finally in control of her faculties again, you fill Minkowski in on what happened, telling her about how you operated on her. When you’re done, she stares at you. “Wow.”

“Yeah,” you say, and your vision goes all misty again. “God, don’t you dare scare me like that again.”

“I won’t, she says, and gives a small laugh. “As long as you keep yourself out of trouble.”

“No promises.” Then you swipe your hair away from your face with a sigh. “Do you need anything?”

Minkowski pauses, thinking about it. “Some water would be nice.”

You nod, and then, because you can and because there’s nothing stopping you and because you’re so, so glad she’s alive, you lean over and kiss her on the cheek. “Okay, off now.” And then you push yourself off towards the door as quickly as possible, your face burning.

When you return with water, you can hear Minkowski and Hera talking. You hesitate for a moment, then go in, just catching the last part of Minkowski’s sentence. “-but how do I tell her?” she asks Hera, and you clear your throat.

“Ask me what?”

Minkowski flushes, turning bright red. “I- nothing,” she says, too fast. “Absolutely nothing.”

Something in your stomach drops because oh god you made a mistake, you shouldn’t have kissed her, and you hand her the cup of water, slowly. “Please, Minkowski, just tell me.”

She’s blushing even more now, and you have to fight to keep from wringing your hands nervously. And then she blurts it out. “If- _when_ we get back, do you… want to go for coffee sometime? Real, not-seaweed coffee, I mean.”

Your eyebrows shoot up. “Minkowski, are you asking me on a date?”

A long pause, and then she laughs sheepishly. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

“Then I guess I accept.” And when she smiles at you, you can almost forget everything else.

 

 


End file.
